After 36 years, The Long Story has published its last issue. It contains my latest novelette, “The Mongrel Gods of Thebes, Nevada.” We will miss this great journal. RIP

Tag: Gospel

Last Sunday’s gospel was one of the best known of Jesus’s miracles, one that has crossed the boundary between religious and popular discourse and inspired discussion on compassion and charity as much as the meaning of Sacrament, on a holistic approach to the person—body and soul—as much as the malleability of natural laws. It is …

A couple of weeks ago, Alice Herz-Sommer died at the age of 110. She was 39 when, with her family and scores of other Jewish intelligentsia, she was sent to Terezin, to a concentration camp the Nazi regime used to demonstrate their humane treatment of the Jews. Through starvation and the death of her mother …

This is not my usual kind of essay. It may not be an essay at all, and it’s not even nice. I am writing this because I can’t be the only one who goes through this particular challenge—it must be ubiquitous enough—and I hope (I hope!) that maybe my rather improvisory train of thought could …

We celebrated the feast of the Epiphany this Sunday. One of the most colorful tales in all the Gospels – really, a fairy tale, the most exciting Nativity narrative. Who doesn’t like a fairy tale? In the Gospel of Matthew, three magi – variously translated as kings and wise men from the Orient – come …

The first generation of Christians expected the Son of Man to come back in their lifetimes, literally any day. They were an apocalyptic Jewish sect, whose Messiah had come and saved and risen in triumph over death—and promised to come back soon to finish the job. And for Jewish apocalyptics, finishing the job meant ending …

John 15:12-17 is a well-known gospel. “It is my commandment,” Jesus says in it to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” And he says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And he says, “No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does …

This past Sunday, in church, I listened to the homily, and it was good. It was moving. It was about the Bread of Life – the Eucharist. I have a special relationship with the Eucharist, the Body of my Betrothed. Yet I found myself bothered by something the priest had said, quite in passing, about …